Are 800 new JWs really baptised per day?

I came across the quote below on a Yahoo answers page discussing the growth of religon:

I'm one of Jehovah's Witnesses and on average every day 800 people are baptized as Jehovah's Witnesses. These are individuals who have studied the Bible for a period of time and have to show that they understand, truly believe and want to live by God's standards. Nobody is forced to do this and it's not that easy as before baptism there is a period where each individual will show their faith by witnessing to others about what they have learnt. These 800 a day are of their own free will baptized so this is a pretty genuine growth not an artificial one based on baby baptisms or that you're just another number in a religion because your parents are that religion."

Is this statistic true? Where did it come from? This equates to 300,000 new JWs per year, this does sound quite impressive!! I also like the comment "not an artificial one based on .......... just another number in a religion because your parents are that religion." LH

Well, the Mormons baptize the dead and JW's baptize the nearly brain dead. If you want to look at the numbers, then almost 999 out of 1000 persons think JW's are kooks and those statistics are impressive, to say the least. OUTLAW will verify that JW's are kooky.

Out of those 800, how many are forced? And by forced, I mean having parents and peer pressure dictate that they either be baptized or get sanctions (bad associations, thrown out of the home, and the like). I also mean parents that hammer in that they will be destroyed unless they get baptized very soon, leading to 6 year olds getting baptized "out of free will" so they will not get destroyed. This is not truly free will.

Unlike the period before 1997, we now have widespread Internet access. Anyone can easily find a million independent reviews on the witless religion, most of which will be bad. Before 1997, Internet access was a privilege (some had it as early as 1990, but you paid for access by the hour, and you had dial-up which tied up a phone line and ran up phone charges). Either you didn't have it, or it was not cost effective to spend several hours researching the topic. So people were scammed into becoming witlesses.

Then, around 1997, they started having offers with ridiculous numbers of free hours (1,500 hours within the next 45 days). That gave people the time to research things. And, broadband Internet (which is a flat rate, always on, and costing around $50 a month) started becoming available. That sped things up, allowing even more cost effective searches. About this time, the witlesses started having major problems getting new people to join the cancer--as well as apostate web sites popping up.

Additionally, most of those getting baptized either leave, become insincere, or merely start doing fake service.

800 x 365 = 292,000. Was the last WW annual report about that figure ?

It is intersting then to look at,over say ten years ,the actual growth,allow a 1 to 2 % loss for death, and you can still see that a Great Crowd is leaving. (If they baptised say, 2.25 million in that ten years ,has their active Pubs, gone up by 2 million ?)

It is also instructive to see that the Adventists baptise a Million a year ! and that is a christian baptism ,into the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not into an organization of men who publish books. (not that I am advocating Adventism,or any ism)

Yeah, if you believe the Society's records that 300,000 are baptized each year, it works out to about 800 per day.

A few things to keep in mind:

1) The vast majority of those baptisms occur in 3rd world countries, where most people are desperate for any kind of hope and the wealth of internet information about JWs is not readily available.

2) Even though the number of baptisms is about 300,000 per year, the overal count of JWs increases by only 100,000 to 150,000 per year. Some of that is due to JWs dying, but there are still 10's of thousands leaving every year

3) The rate of baptisms is declining. About 7 or 8 years ago it was around 1000 per day, now it is down to 800 or so.